New Arrival of Sacred White Bison Calf

A white bison calf was born last week at the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation in Manitoba, Canada, bringing the number of the extremely rare animals in the herd to five. Herd caretaker Tony Tacan says the white buffalo mother has had five calves in total -- one brown and four white -- even though all the fathers were brown. Just how unusual that really is depends on the source of information, but all agree it's a rare and deeply spiritual event for this community and beyond.

"The first calf she produced was brown and the ones after that were all white," says Tacan. "Nobody ever expects this to happen. There's a reason this is happening, and all we can do is share it with our First Nations brothers and sisters so they have a place to come and pray for people who would otherwise feel hopeless."

The Dakota, Lakota and Nakota people see the birth of a white bison calf as a sign that the prophecy of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is now coming true. According to Lakota legend, the first sacred pipe was brought to Earth 19 generations ago by a divine messenger known as White Buffalo Calf Woman (known in the Lakota language as Pte-san Win-yan). The pipe was given to the people who would not forget -- the Oceti Sakowin, or Seven Council Fires of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations. The Buffalo Calf Woman came to the tribes when there was a great famine and instructed them about living in balance with nature. She gifted the people with a sacred bundle containing the White Buffalo Calf Pipe, which still exists to this day and is kept by Chief Arvol Looking Horse of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.

Over a period of four days, White Buffalo Calf Woman instructed the people in the Seven Sacred Rites: the seven traditional rituals that use the sacred pipe. When the teaching of the sacred rites was complete, she told the people that she must return to the spirit world. She asked them to honor the teachings of the pipe and to keep it in a sacred manner. Before leaving, the woman told them that within her were four ages, and that she would look upon the people in each age, returning at the end of the fourth age to restore harmony and balance to a troubled world. She said she would send a sign that her return was near in the form of an unusual buffalo, which would be born white.

Since then, the vast herds of bison that once migrated across the North American plains have dwindled, hunted into near extinction by nineteenth-century non-indigenous hunters. With their numbers reduced at one time to a mere 500 animals, and the chances of a white calf being born estimated at one in ten million, the fulfillment of the prophecy of White Buffalo Calf Woman seemed improbable. However, a white buffalo calf was born in 1994, and since then at least four to six of these sacred buffalo calves have been born every year. Even more significant was the virgin birth of a white buffalo calf at the Woodland Zoo in Farmington, Pennsylvania in 2006. It would be hard to believe, but Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th generation keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, has confirmed that a female buffalo gave birth in captivity without artificial insemination or a male buffalo present. Chief Looking Horse believes that these are all signs that the prophecy of the White Buffalo Calf Woman is now coming true.

The End Of Empathy

Americans seem to be losing their ability to empathize. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people's emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling. You try to imagine yourself in their place in order to understand what they are feeling or experiencing. Empathy is the tangible sense of our interconnectedness.

When I was growing up in the '60s, empathy was fashionable. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started integrating the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to annihilate each other with nuclear weapons -- or learn to see the world through each other's eyes. Civil rights activists also embraced the idea. During the '60s, an evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.

Then, about a decade ago, a skepticism about empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: "It's not really my problem if others suffer misfortune and need help" or "Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how it would feel to be in their place."

Konrath collected decades of studies and observed a very clear pattern. Starting around 2000, the line chart starts to go down. More students say it's not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else's perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation!

It's odd to think of empathy, which is an innate human impulse, as fluctuating up and down in this way. But that's exactly what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me about the "golden rule" or principle of empathy and reciprocity, the basis of all social morality.

Their feeling was: Why should they empathize with someone else, much less someone they considered an enemy? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.

The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your "enemies," but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That's practically a taboo. And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force -- a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.

We can't return to my generation's era of progressive empathy, but we can't give up on it either. Empathy is the bedrock of intimacy and close connection. Without it, we are unable to navigate our social worlds or sustain meaningful relationships. The end of empathy is the end of civility.